Have you ever bent over for something and then been abruptly brought to a complete stop? I’m not talking about contortionism, where the body is bent in shapes unknown to the geometric sciences, but like reaching down to grab something off the floor when you’re sitting in your office chair. Or knowing that if you have a bowl of cereal and take aspirin for your legs in the same day, you might as well just grab a Sharpie and scrawl “Occupied” on the bathroom door, because that’s where you’ll be spending the majority of your evening and the better part of tomorrow. I mean, I knew going in that I wasn’t preparing for longevity, but I really didn’t think that everything would start going out so soon. I was kind of hoping for my body to shut down a little more dramatically, rather than this piecemeal approach of stuff just not working right anymore. For instance, just after typing that last sentence, I stretched a little bit to really work into a morning yawn, and now it feels like I have a molten ice pick stabbing quickly in and out of that general area between my shoulder blades. And the best part? Sometimes, when I yawn, something happens to my jaw, and I’m stuck there with the lower part of my face hanging diagonally from the rest because looking like I’m attempting to mock someone who has suffered some sort of brain injury is apparently the only expression that I am allowed which will exempt me from a rolling cranial agony.

 My Physical Therapist (back when I had that sweet, sweet, pre-tax Health Insurance) said that she thought it was all the stress which I seemed to be carrying around that was causing my discomfort. That my muscles were held in perpetual tension, and the slightest move could throw the whole thing (the thing in this case being my entire musculoskeletal system) out of whack. I remember our first couple of sessions together, when she would feel the knots in my legs and back, and keep insisting that I relax, only to have me fire back that I was, in fact, relaxing, and that if she would like me to continue to do so, she might reconsider harping on about it. On a side note: a few years ago, my wife saw that I was in some distress, and insisted on giving me a massage. It felt wonderful (but then again, intimate moments with the one you love are usually bound to do that, and there are few things more intimate than leaving yourself completely vulnerable to another, and letting them near your spinal column. Or, if you’re me, taking your shirt off in front of another. I don’t like that I have boobs now), but as soon as she managed to work out the first knot, my back began collapsing back into itself, as if my spine were held straight like a suspension bridge.

Of course, my doctor didn’t want to prescribe me muscle relaxants, referring to them as “rum and Coke in a pill”, and instead prescribing me a series of medications that not only failed to take away my pain, but began causing psychological issues as well. Instead of following the therapist’s recommendation, and listening to his patient that the only thing that’s ever worked for my Bi-Polar is regular, plain-old, no kickbacks lithium, he decided to keep trying to kill two birds with an increasingly expensive collections of “just one stone.” He eventually referred me to a pain specialist, but by that point, I’d already put myself slightly into debt, and couldn’t afford the “Specialist Visit” or the take the time off of from my job, as apparently this guy was only seeing patients during the times I had to be at work. As for the psych consult: my insurance kept dragging their feet and refusing to cover a visit with the guy who came to the clinic that I was already going to. I could understand, I suppose, if I was begging Valium, or something equally pernicious (Dear God! We can’t allow people to consume anything that might actually make them feel better! Say, Bob, pass me a Scotch?), but the only thing I needed to go along with a regimen of lithium was series of blood draws to make sure that I wasn’t building up to a level of toxicity. But again, I’ve found it almost impossible to get the meds that work for me, because you can’t get more generic than an element and there’s nothing in it for the Healthcare Industry/Big Pharma if I take it instead of one of their new wonder drugs. You know the ones. The brand new antidepressants whose side effects include suicidal thoughts (not to mention that lithium is an anti-manic, and works to keep the depression away by tempering the mania, and thereby staving off the inevitable burnout).

I admit that in my younger years, I might have been inclined toward a more debauched approach to my pain management. Of course, the majority of the pain which I experienced throughout my adolescence was of a more philosophical nature. But now I’d like to have a life where I could be pain-free, and do the things I dreamed of doing when I still had a range of motion. I know that losing weight and exercising will address most of what I am suffering from, but it’s hard to put yourself upon that road when it’s hard to even get out of your bed. The weight of not only the world is hanging down upon my bones, and I don’t want to get to the point where Jerry Springer has to cut me out of my apartment. But when walking to the store is an enhanced interrogation of my joints, I am less likely to get even the most basic of my daily recommended calisthenics.

There is no money to be made in making people well. Why, in this world where everything has a price tag, would you look to cure an ill for just one payment, when you could manage a condition, and get your monthly paycheck? I realize my Marx is showing, but since when does medicine, at its core, have anything to do with dollars? Jonas Salk could have bought an island if he’d wanted, but he chose instead to give it all away. Do no harm, their oath decrees, but let’s haggle over the semantics. People with terminal diseases are made to endure their months (or years) of hell, because we’d rather dope them up and keep them high, than actually end their pain. But if you might need something to help you keep on living, if your head’s not quite ready for life’s guillotine, then, sorry, lad, you’re on your own. Even worse is the trend to find a new chemical combination which has no practical application, and then to hurry off in search of some plausibly unknown condition which this new drug now magically can treat. I’d say the very state of medicine is sickening to me, but I’m uninsured, and I’m not sure I can afford it.

So what is the answer? I have absolutely no clue how to get us from where we are to where I think we should be. When society would rather that that suffering keep on doing so, it’s hard to frame the benefits of universal health. I wonder what would happen if we stopped shouting about our exceptionalism, and actually did something to show it. I wonder what would happen if we made it a point to offer a real education of all of our citizens, not just the ones who can afford to pay. I’m curious to know if people would work harder if their bellies were full of healthy foods, and had access to a doctor outside of an E.R. There is the myth of the Rugged Individual, who built this country by himself with nothing more than his bare hands. Never mind that a society is not just a group of individuals all working for his own enrichment. The point, it seems to me, is that we have come together to be more than we might be apart. To do things with one another than cannot be done alone. There are seven billion people on this Earth of ours, and the vast majority of them are no better off than they might have been centuries ago.

Set an example, America. You think the world hates you because of your smorgasbord of liberty? Yeah, I’m not usually put out with the rich guy because of all the advantages he has, but by the fact that for him to have them, I must be deprived of something. We have the wisdom and the capabilities to feed the entire world, and instead we send them bombs and drones and wonder why they’re not our friends. Maybe they won’t do the things we’d rather that they do, not toe the party line that we’ve laid down in the sand. And I’m sure that someday an evil will arise that the world will be forced to band together to defeat. But maybe we could try to stop shooting first, and then questioning the corpses. We have eradicated diseases, put men on the moon, split the very atom, and we allow people in this country and throughout the world to starve? To die of curable illnesses? To remain ignorant and powerless until they have no alternative but to ally themselves with someone with charisma and self-interest, engage in banal acts of atrocity, simply because wasting away is something that they’d rather never do?

We have a choice. We can remain ignorant bullies and keep threatening the third world countries with “democracy”, as that’s been working really well for the past sixty years or so, or we can elevate the conversation and insist on helping those who might not otherwise be able to help themselves. It will mean sacrificing for the meekest of the Earth, for those with nothing left to lose. But surely a Christian nation could do no less. And the flow of riches to those whom rags might be a godsend will ease the burden of the wealthy as they gaze upon the camel attempting to thread the needle.

-Tex

I think my big mistake has been letting the nonsense of the outside world filter in. This morning, I was reading about one of the red states which has decided that we don’t need to teach anything to our students other than”America, Fuck Yeah!” Not that this should come as any surprise. I’ve been told by people who were alive at the time that the internment of the Japanese Americans during World War II “was for their own good.” Wow. Again, a truly telling sentiment. Instead of trying to strive for exceptionalism in the face of our baser desires, we cling on to the notion that the history written by the victors is the only story worth knowing. The irony, of course, is that the same people who derided communist nations and dictatorial regimes for controlling the only information which might reach their citizens are now trying to control and limit the information which reaches the ears of their own constituents. I don’t know, maybe if we outlaw knowledge, kids will finally seek it out because it is taboo. Hell, let’s declare a War on Education, and drive up test scores by secret cabals of students huddled around contraband textbooks from the coasts.

Yes, I know, my rant is suffering from a painfully liberal bias. It’s just that sometimes I get overwhelmingly frustrated with otherwise intelligent people doing abhorrent things. Take the issue of gay marriage. There is opinion that a religious union is the only definition of marriage, and therefore cannot be applied to homosexuals. But, as a consolation prize, the gays could totally have civil unions. I then asked if, by this definition, my wife and I were married. I was told, of course. I then pointed out that, not only were we married in a civil ceremony, but I am an atheist. How is it right that the religious protection of marriage is okay with someone who wants to get rid of religion to make the world a better place, but won’t consider two Christians who happen to possess similar genitalia? It’s easy to deny a right to someone if you don’t consider them a real person, and have never had that right denied to yourself. But I’ve gotten just a little bit off topic.

There are those who believe that to admit that this country has condoned such shameful acts is to somehow lessen the value of the American spirit. This is and has always been, at its best, a country of ideals. In reality we, as citizens of this nation, have failed at least as often as we have succeeded, but what made this country great was our forefathers standing right back up again and forcing themselves to do it better. This country was born on the backs of genocide and slavery, and that is a lot to overcome. And it’s no good to mention that slavery was the status quo among the colonizing nations of the day, or mention that the Spanish took their genocide to a multicontinental level. We are not going to find redemption in the fact that other people were simply worse. Like a home that’s rapidly approaching spring cleaning, the task of knowing where to start is often overwhelming, but to do nothing will accomplish just the same. We cannot fix, nor rewrite the past, but we can learn from it, and do our best to make sure that it can never happen again.

Let’s go back to the example I mentioned earlier: The internment of the Japanese Americans during World War II. Despite their innocence, it probably was safer for them to be anywhere else. But locking up a group of people just because you cannot control your other citizens’ idiocy and mob mentality is not what you should be focusing on. There is a certain shame in locking up a group of people just because you think it’s necessary to hate the country of their origin. What can we do to make it up to those who suffered this indignity? Absolutely nothing, other than to ensure that it never again may come to pass, and not sweep this chapter under the rug of patriotism.

When the Native Americans were rounded up, killed off, deposited upon land we decided that we didn’t need, and then moved again when we changed our minds, stripped of their languages and cultures, that was okay, because of manifest destiny. This continent was ours, and, by God, we were going to tame it. And whom did we decide to use to do the taming? Another group of people we felt must be inferior because they weren’t European. Religion was also used in the justification of slavery, as some ideas are apparently too good to need to change over the course of millennia. We took those people from their lands and brought them here as property. We destroyed families and cultures and destabilized a continent on our way to do the same to another one. There is no way that we can undo the sins the men and women of our nation committed in the name of whatever they used to justify their actions. My guess is the Holy Sound of the British Pound (and later, the Almighty Dollar).

So what can we do to make it right? What can we do try and put right what once went wrong (I called Scott Bakula, but it turns out he’s busy)? Let’s start by trying to figure out how to level the playing field so that it’s not any harder to get ahead in life just based upon the color of your skin or the construction of your reproductive organs. We could have the most prosperous land in all the world, if only we could learn to lift up one another. And why stop at this country, when we are but a small part of a global species? I know that it’s easier to do what you must just to get by, but maybe if we could all get together and put our head together, we could use the genius of our species and figure out how to change the rules of life and steer it away from being a zero sum game. But the only way to do that is to set aside our seeming desire for the comfort of ignorance and face the hard truths that none of us is perfect. And the only way to do that is to open up our avenues for education, not shut down everything that makes us question everything, and ourselves as well.

-Tex

I find this “debate” over climate change to be reminiscent of the “debate” over tobacco during the ’90’s. Big corporations paying scientists to be uncertain about the evidence, throwing unreasonable doubt into a conversation about public health. As a country, we’d known, for decades prior to my existence, that smoking cigarettes was not a healthy choice, and each passing generation found more disturbing links to illness. I can’t actually believe that any CEO truly thought that his products were a negligible risk (and internal memos show this belief to be true). In the end, it came down to a choice to funnel millions of dollars into lobbyists and partial ownership of politicians rather than face the collapse of a harmful industry. I smoke. Until I finally beat back that addiction, I will continue to do so. I am under no illusions about what it is doing to my body. And I try to limit the harm to others by smoking outdoors, properly disposing of my butts, and maintaining a distance between myself and non-smokers. I do this because, while I am willing to sacrifice my health to look 30% cooler, I don’t know that I have the right to make that choice for anyone else. I will give the tobacco companies credit, though: they never got a court to slap a gag order on an entire town.

Over the past decade, I’ve seen a small shift in the conversation about global warming. No longer is it automatically dismissed out of hand: there’s simply too much evidence to keep one’s head firmly lodged in the sand. The counterattack is now focused on whether the change in climate is man-made. And this is where the final battle will be fought. If it is a natural change in the global climate cycle, then it’s cool if we keep burning gas. A multi-billion dollar industry gets to breathe a (labored) sigh of relief. We get to keep funding those who would seek to cause us harm. The oil and gas companies would rather spend tens of billions now to fight for their right to irreparably harm the planet just to squeeze the final penny out, than to invest in real alternatives which would make their current operations obsolete. It’s not even up for debate whether we will have to get away from our addiction to petroleum: sooner or later, especially at current usage, the wells are going to run dry. Instead of being proactive, and discovering and championing the next big leap in energy, these corporations seem prepared to wait until they are left no other option (after having spoiled the natural beauty that had been set aside that somewhere might remain untouched by human influence) before considering a change in operations.

But it’s not just oil that should be worrying us. The push for “natural gas” has come with its own set of inexcusable thrusts toward “progress.” Fracking is the term that is being stricken from the tongues of millions of Americans. I was going to do some research for this article (I know, spooky, right?), but it turns out that apparently the first rule of Hydraulic Fracturing is that you don’t talk about Hydraulic Fracturing. Okay, that’s not entirely true: we have some idea of what it’s doing to the areas where it is being done, but any comprehensive study of the effects on humans (and animals) is being contested and buried beneath miles of legal red tape by armies of high-priced lawyers. This is an ingenious strategy, really. Instead of having to declare that the data are inconclusive, these companies can merely ensure that that not a single datum ever reaches the light of day. It’s hard to contest something you cannot even verify. But we shouldn’t worry, because if it was harmful, these companies wouldn’t want to kill off their own consumers, would they? I mean, there’s no precedent for something like that in American history, is there? I mean, it’s not like there are blighted, abandoned mining towns, unlivable by man or beast? I’m sure the people who’d been living there had merely lacked the courage to go out and see the world, and if it weren’t for the mining companies, they might never have followed through on it. It’s not like people have dumped so much garbage into a body of water that it can be lit on fire. It’s not like I included an example in the first paragraph.

I enjoy eating food with a certain expectation that it shouldn’t make me ill. I appreciate not having to boil my water before I drink it. I like knowing that it’s safe to breathe the air around me*. I approve of the legislation that prohibits children from working. I give two thumbs up to having a level of compensation that my employer absolutely cannot drop below. These are all things that had to be legislated at some point because the companies of those days refused to do it for themselves. The “Free Market” only works up to a certain point. Companies make themselves complicit in the commission of the most banal of evils because that’s the way it has always been done, or it’s better now than it was before, and until the people see the benefit of change, they don’t know just how much better their quality of life could be.

Corporations don’t exist to look out for the common man, and even most small businesses are geared to profit over greater good. I don’t begrudge them that. Most businesses exist to sell a product, and almost never is that product actual well-being. That is why there should be people who serve the public’s needs. People designated to protect those cannot protect themselves. We formed societies so that we might have a better chance to survive the natural world. But, as in nature, it is the tendency of the strong to prey upon the weak, and unless the weak can band together, prey they will remain. Those in power have an obligation to look to facts (independently verifiable), and not simply accept the assurances of the self-regulated, as they attempt to govern. A man who thinks that science is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo has no business chairing a committee which oversees agencies made up of scientific institutions. Willful ignorance is not a qualification to be a public servant.

-Tex

*California excepted.

I refuse to stand in fear for a moment longer at the thought that someone might want to hurt or kill me because of something that I may or may not believe. To be fair, I’ve refused to be afraid of terrorism for as long as I can remember, thinking that the tragedy on the eleventh of September, 2001 was more an act of war than of mere fear-mongering. The entire point of terrorism is to instill fear into your opponent, and make them fundamentally change who they are; it is as much a psychological tactic as a physical demonstration of force. If you remove someone’s ability to react rationally, you get to frame every future interaction. In the moment of overwhelming dread, there are only two emotional responses we are hardwired to engage: Fight or Flight. Either you demoralize the entire population into acquiescing to your demands, or you goad them into ill-prepared military engagements they cannot hope to win, especially if your goal was merely to poison the very thing that gave them strength. We have been waging a War on Terror, which is much like punching looming shadows in the twilight. You cannot fight an idea or an emotion from behind a rocket launcher or missile silo, and you can only kill the man with deadly force, not the fanaticism which has made him.

This war, in one form or another, has been going on for centuries, with ever-shifting theaters of conflict and a revolving cast of players. In this country, a good number of decent people have been led to believe that they should fear Muslims, because that is the purported faith of those that have sought to do us harm. Obviously, their faith is wrong, their religion inherently violent: their values are different from our own, and they present a clear danger to our very way of life. Look at the way they dehumanize women, legislating every square inch of their sinfully tempting flesh as to not incite the animal passions of these savages. These infidels claim the weaker sex as property, dictating what rights they have to their own bodies. What kind of monster would treat another human being as something less than human? And those extremists smother any expression of free speech, not only in their own backward lands, but throughout the entire world, threatening harm at those who might seek to slander the tenets and holy figures of their faith. They seek out a way back into the past, based upon words written centuries ago, finding justifications for atrocities in the name of their “God.” It’s our duty to our omnipotent master to wipe the stain of their existence from the face of the earth.

Of course, everything I wrote before, is equally applicable to the other side as well. When you’re misinformed, and facts twisted or withheld from you, you latch on to anything you are told. Extremists are extremists, regardless of which deity they prefer, and do not represent the populace as a whole. There are very few who would argue that the Westboro Baptist Church is representative of what “true” Christians believe or how they should behave. So why then would one believe that the worst of humanity would represent another nominally peaceful religion? Just as those who cherry-pick Leviticus to denounce the “sins” of others, while still doing what they like (arguing that eating shellfish or pork is now okay, as are cheeseburgers and poly-cotton blends, but homosexuality is still against the Law), anyone can skim through a holy book and use it to justify almost anything. And those who seek to reunite the laws of man with the Law of God have no further to look than the lands where we are sending our brave men and women to fight and die in the name of the Almighty Petrol. You cannot ridicule Sharia Law while advocating adorning courthouses with the Ten Commandments.

But I will go one step further now, and call to claim their uncounted dead, those very institutions which permit these types of horrors to persist: I call out those churches and religious leaders (of each and every faith) who have remained silent in the face of bigotry and medieval sentiment until it has become too abhorrent to ignore, or who have, themselves, advocated hateful and vindictive punishments to those who have somehow run afoul of something which they hold so dear. Since the very first protestations of faith in something just beyond, there have been wars to defend the omnipotence and honor of a whole pantheon of supreme beings, and despite the fact that we now know that the earth isn’t flat, and isn’t the center of the universe, have wireless communications and magic boxes capable of reproducing images, sounds, and all the collected wisdom of the ages, still the notion persists that a group of people living in a time before sanitation and germ theory knew all there was to know. As extremists utilize technology (built upon the very science which they find so blasphemous) to murder one another in the name of God, and seek out their place in Paradise, squeezing through the loophole of Thou Shalt Not Kill (…unless they believe something slightly different than you; in that case, go right ahead and wipe the buggers out), they defend to the death their right to impose regulations predating by millennia the tools with which they slaughter others.

To paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I have a dream that my son will one day live in a world where he will not be judged by the color of his skin, nor belief or disbelief in a higher power, but by the content of his character. Artifices of power have been utilized since the dawn of time to control the common man (who usually wants nothing more than to just survive another day, free of hunger and desperation), and the only thing that has ever truly changed in the days since man worshiped the sun is the name.

-Tex